Joel D. Kline
February 29, 2004
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
The First Sunday in Lent
(Lenten Theme: Turning Toward Jerusalem)
For the past couple of years I have been attending an annual preaching conference, the Festival of Homiletics, featuring a host of challenging preachers. Two years ago William Willimon, dean of the chapel at Duke University, shared the story of a man named High Thompson who had recently been the recipient of an honorary degree at Duke. In 1968 Thompson was a young helicopter pilot flying on patrol over the countryside of Vietnam. On March 16 of that year Thompson and his crew were flying over the village of My Lai, and they observed a nightmare taking place below them, as an American army unit, in the midst of war’s madness, had lost control of discipline, reason and humanity, slaughtering unarmed civilians in the village, most of them women, children, and elderly men. As would later be determined, more than 500 individuals had already been executed.
Seeing what was taking place, Thompson landed the helicopter between the troops and the remaining villagers. At significant risk to himself, High Thompson got out of the copter and confronted the officer in charge, William Calley. He then airlifted the few surviving villagers out of My Lai, and also radioed a report of the scene that resulted in a halt to action in the area, thereby likely sparing thousands of civilian lives.
On the day Thompson received an honorary degree, most of the graduates were only half listening, as any of us who have participated in such formalities might expect. But when Thompson began speaking, the student body soon adopted a thoughtful silence. For Thompson’s response to the question, how did he find the courage and strength to do what he did that day, was simple yet profound. Said High Thompson,
I’d like to thank my mother and father for trying to instill in me the difference between right and wrong. We were country people. I was raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and we had very little. But one thing we did have was the Golden Rule. My parents taught me early, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s why I did what I did that day. It’s hard to put certain things into words. You’re going to have to make many decisions in your life. Please make the right decisions because we’re depending on you. God bless you all.
The testimony of High Thompson reminds us that the decisions we make day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, can have remarkable consequences. The quality of Thompson’s decisions had been influenced by his faith, by his hearing of those New Testament texts that challenge us to embrace a higher level of righteousness in our daily interactions. The young pilot had read the road map of faith, and allowed that faith to impact the ways he treats fellow human beings.
In the aftermath of Jesus’ baptism he heads deeper into the wilderness for a time of struggle, reflection, and decision. It is for Jesus a time to read the road map—that is, a time to consider and clarify the shape and the course his public ministry will take. In the wilderness Jesus comes to terms with the kinds of choices that will enable him to hold fast to the life story God sets before him. In the wilderness Jesus is grappling with just how fully to embrace this calling from God. Will Jesus’ ministry and actions flow forth from his identity as God’s beloved son, as God’s chosen one? Will Jesus accept the life story given him by God? Or will he choose an alternative story; will he instead heed the lure of quick success, of popularity and notoriety, of unbridled power over others?
In ancient Israel the Jordan wilderness serves as a vital symbol of new starts, new beginnings. A central story of Israel’s faith is that of the Exodus—God rescuing the Hebrew people from bondage in Egypt and guiding them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Centuries later the prophet Hosea describes God as a jilted lover whose bride, Israel, has gone off with someone else. The covenant made between God and Israel under Moses has been broken, and so the prophet, speaking for God, cries out, “I will lead Israel into the wilderness, and woo her all over again” (Hosea 2:14). And during those difficult days following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, a number of the prophets spoke of a new pathway through the wilderness being prepared. In the transformed wilderness, as the desert blossoms and rejoices, God and Israel shall be reunited.
Little surprise, then, that it is in the Jordan wilderness that Jesus is baptized, and that the Spirit would then lead Jesus even more deeply into that wilderness for a time of testing, a time of discerning. We sometimes lose sight of the fact that it is the Spirit of God, not a spirit of evil, that prompts this time of testing, this time when Jesus struggles with what it shall mean for him to embark into new and uncertain territory. While in the wilderness, it is Jesus’ very identity and vocation that are being assaulted. Jesus comes through the experience, confirming his calling to announce and inaugurate the reign of God. But he shall do by pursuing a path little understood by the people of his day who were hoping beyond hope for a Messiah intent upon crushing the Roman oppressors and restoring Israel to former glory.
In the wilderness Jesus hears a voice urging him along paths of self-centeredness, but Jesus resolves instead to walk in paths of self-giving love. Jesus determines to live as a servant whose love embraces all manner of people. Later in the Gospel of Luke Jesus will affirm, “I am among you as one who serves” (22:27), but in the wilderness the devil suggests to Jesus that there is a far easier way, there is an alternative life-perspective. “Command this stone to become bread. Spend your energies and your gifts serving self. Seek first your own needs and appetites.” But Jesus counters, “One does not live by bread alone.” Life is more than self-serving, says Jesus; genuine life, abundant life, is found as we live for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors.
In the wilderness Jesus resolves that the old ways of choosing the spectacular simply to gain notoriety and position will not do; Jesus instead comes among us with a healing, a renewing, a redeeming, a restoring presence. The old ways of rebelling against oppressors, stooping to their level, will not do; instead, Jesus determines to model a life that includes loving one’s enemies and praying for one’s persecutors. Jesus determines to love and serve God—and God alone.
The wonder and glory of Jesus, you see, is not that Jesus was somehow above the fray, untouched by normal human temptations; the glory is that Jesus resisted the temptations, exposing life in which we jockey for attention and position as empty illusion. Instead, affirms Jesus, our central identity in life, our focus, is to be found in the wondrous affirmation that you and I are beloved sons and daughters of God. In the wilderness Jesus allows his calling, his vocation as beloved Son of God to set the agenda for all that follows, and he leaves the wilderness to proclaim the good news of life in God’s kingdom and to invite his hearers—to invite us—again and again to take hold of life with God at the center. It is an invitation to live as those who know that life is more than bread alone, as those who understand that to worship God wholeheartedly entails taking up a cross and embracing the risk of living for others, as those who do not put God to the test but instead choose to journey along paths of discipleship.
In truth, the temptations Jesus faces are our temptations as well. Indeed, is not the power of the Lenten season that we are setting aside these weeks to consider our own calling—a calling to journey with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem? If it is an authentic journey of faith, we too shall find ourselves passing through the wilderness. But can we so open ourselves to God that our own wilderness is transformed into paradise, and water—living water—shall break forth in our own deserts.
In his book Bread for the Wilderness, Wine for the Journey John Killinger reminds us quite simply that life can be for us either a wilderness or a paradise. It all depends on how we look at life and what we make of life. Prayer, opening ourselves to God, is at the very heart of our response; indeed, prayer is the Christian life. Writes Killinger,
It is only as we learn to pray that the meaning of faith comes alive to us, and the presence of God in Christ becomes real to us. Until then, all of the dogmas and teachings of the church are only stumbling blocks to our understanding, for they, like prayer itself, seem to fly in the face of all that we have agreed to know about ourselves and our world. Until then, the world remains a wilderness.
While in his wilderness, Jesus chooses a path that runs counter to the wisdom of the world. And as we connect more deeply with God, that is our challenge as well. Marcus Borg, writing in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, reminds us,
As a journeying with Jesus, discipleship means being on the road with Jesus. It means to be an itinerant, a sojourner; it is to have nowhere to lay one’s head, no permanent resting place. It means undertaking the journey from the life of conventional wisdom … to the alternative wisdom of life in the Spirit.
In Church of the Brethren tradition we have spoken of this as a call to nonconformity, taking our cues not primarily from the culture around us, but from our rootedness in God. To embrace the alternative wisdom of God’s Spirit is to recognize that we cannot serve two masters, that our values and priorities in life flow from our connectedness with God rather than any human authority. To embrace the alternative wisdom of the Spirit is to seek first the kingdom of God; it is to follow the road map of faith.
A great deal of attention has been given in recent days to Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ. Several evenings ago on the news persons who had seen The Passion were being interviewed, and a Catholic priest, obviously moved by his viewing of the movie, asserted, “After all, that’s what Jesus came to do—Jesus came on earth to die.” I wanted to have some dialogue with that priest, but it didn’t seem very useful to talk with an unresponsive television! But my reading of the Gospels would suggest that Jesus came for much more than to die. Jesus came to live and proclaim, to teach and model a whole new way of living—a way of living based upon compassion and goodness, peace and servanthood, justice and self-giving love. Along the way, Jesus did indeed “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), a decision he no doubt understood would lead to confrontation and resistance and death. The willingness to suffer and die was the result of Jesus wholeheartedly embracing the vocation and ministry to which he had been called at his baptism, a vocation and ministry he affirms in that wilderness experience. And Jesus’ death and resurrection remind us in a powerful way that hate and evil do not have the final word, that life is more powerful than death, that hope is stronger than despair.
You and I must struggle with our calling, with our true identity and vocation as God’s beloved daughters and sons. Along the way, we will face confusers and confusions. But as we walk through the wilderness, as we grapple with the questions, as we consider the road map of faith, we find our lives re-directed and transformed. This Lenten season, shall we not turn with Jesus toward Jerusalem?